Lights out, everybody

Ithaca’s been having one heck of an ice storm. It blew in on Friday and then kept everybody close to home on Saturday. Of course, I decided the weather necessitated a nice, long walk on Saturday morning–and it felt great! Beautiful trees and a quiet that you don’t often get, even in rural places.

But last night the wind picked up and our power went out around 5:30 . . . and it didn’t come back on ’til 6:30 this morning. Thankfully, this was the one day ever when I didn’t seriously need to use the computer. So I wrote letters and read by candlelight, and then when it got too cold I crawled in bed with my travel alarm, my down comforter, and my cat. It was quite lovely, actually. I had lots of candles, a good flashlight, and my housemate has a wired phone, so I felt perfectly safe. She also has a wood stove, in case we were really stuck without heat for longer than a few hours.

But then around 11:00pm I heard cursing in my driveway and sneaked into the living room to watch some young guy unhook what I later realized was a sizable tree from the front of his gigantic truck. He’d driven right into it farther up the road and then dragged it all the way down. I wasn’t thrilled about a large, swearing man in my yard, but after about five minutes of watching I suddenly thought things would be just fine, so I pulled on some warm outerwear and went outside. This is why in Ithaca you sleep in yoga pants and layered sweatshirts! 🙂

For whatever reason, he was in a great mood. In fact, he reminded me of my brother: shiny toys (this was a nice truck), looking for a bit of trouble, but personable as all get-out. So he and I joked about the weather, about whether or not the cops would be able to get up my road, etc. And he hauled the tree off the road (man, I felt like such a girl in my polka-dotted rain boots and wool coat!). So by about midnight I had a tree chainsaw-ed into pieces on the side of my road and an amusing story that made me laugh even as I was going to sleep.

Erin